To call it a pet peeve is to diminish its significance in the realm of communication.  It drives me nuts that lawyers, witnesses and especially judges are no longer capable of expressing themselves with sufficient precision and clarity to convey a meaningful message. 

Most of us, fuzzy thinking ourselves, do not realize that this failure to communicate happens.  We assume we understand by placing the gist of the communication into our own hazy world of comprehension.  The bottom line is that the sender has no idea whether he has communicated whatever it is he intended to, while the recipient has no clue whether he got the idea that the sender was attempting to communicate.  Convoluted indeed.

And so, I was excited to the Concurring Opinions piece entitled “When Words Lose Their Meaning.”  Prof. Frank Pasquale, late of Seton Hall Law School in beautiful Newark, New Jersey (“Why do they call it the Garden State?  Because the Oil and Gas Refinery State wouldn’t fit on the license plates.”)


wise book When Words Lose Their Meaning . His take on Thucydides is particularly relevant to our predicament .


That’s just incredible!  Just the other day I was telling my wife about the relevance of Thucydides to our current predicament.  This is way more true than you are likely to realize. But enough about me. 

You should read the post.  You should read the book.  But most of all, you should spend a few minutes thinking about the subject.  Listen to yourself communicate, and ask yourself whether the sounds emanating from your mouth or the marks emanating from you pen do anything to clarify and illuminate, or just waste ink.